[Spivak]

This is a leadership problem (or not a problem) at its core. The engineers make whatever the people at the top reward making. Unless the people running the actual business side of the business choose to invest in maintenance and refinement it won’t happen. And very often that is a deliberate choice.

I think a lot of engineers miss the forest for the trees when it comes to stuff like this because what we value is good engineering and convince ourselves that such a thing is a prerequisite to the overall business success.

If you can’t convincingly argue why $work will have a positive ROI with engineer hourly rates then it won’t happen. How I’ve sold it in the past is having a bug bash where we groom and fix a couple hundred open issues and then use it as marketing fodder. It’s possible to make bugfixes as flashy as a new feature release if you sell it right.